Note 133 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

7. In 1864, after an abstention of twenty years from discussion of the problem, Strauss restated his case in a Life of Jesus, adapted for the German People. Here, accepting the contention of F. C. Baur that the proper line of inquiry was to settle the order of composition of the synoptic gospels, and agreeing in Baur’s view that Matthew came first, he undertook to offer more of positive result than was reached in his earlier research, which simply dealt scientifically with the abundant elements of dubiety in the records. The new procedure was really much less valid than the old. Baur had quite unwarrantably decided that the Sermon on the Mount was one of the most certainly genuine of the discourses ascribed to Jesus;133 and Strauss, while exhibiting a reserve of doubt134 as to all “such speeches,” nonetheless committed himself to the “certain” genuineness alike of the Sermon and of the seven parables in the thirteenth chapter of Matthew.135 Many scholars who continue to hold by the historicity of Jesus have since recognized that the Sermon is no real discourse, but a compilation of gnomic sayings or maxims previously current in Jewish literature.136 Thus the certainties of Baur and Strauss pass into the category of the cruder certainties which Strauss impugned; and the latter left the life of Jesus an unsolved enigma after all his analysis.